A mixed bag

Posted on November 15, 2006
Filed Under Current affairs, Life |

I’ve got a lot of time on my hands today, so stick with me as I rant through a number of topics. Most of these thoughts have been running through my head since about 7am this morning as I lay in bed so they may spill out in a slightly disjointed manner. Please pay attention…..

I’m sitting here patiently waiting for the English language version of Al-Jazeera to launch. I think it surfaces around 12 noon today and will certainly make interesting viewing. I’m not exactly sure what to expect. Reporting which is equally biased towards the east as our press is to the west ? Or just more blokes in grainy home videos wearing robes, carrying Kalashnikovs and condemning Bush and Blair ? Hopefully the latter as I love a good medieval rant about infidels. Cheers me right up that does.

Actually I’m expecting to be pleasantly surprised. I’m looking forward to getting a more balanced view of the worlds problems. As neither Al-Jazeera nor Sky News/BBC News give a completely impartial view and no channel exists which currently does, I have decided that the best option is to spend 5 minutes watching one channel then switch over to the other. Obviously it will make bugger all sense but I will at least feel like I’ve seen both sides of the story and I will sleep easier in my bed tonight. I jest. Really.

Such thoughts do however bring to mind a particularly bizarre experience I had at a wedding about 4 years ago in Dublin. An Irish girl was marrying a Mexican bloke and we were invited to the nuptials. Suffice to say, as an ardent people watcher and lover of obscure situations, the invite to this wedding was like manna from the heavens.

Now it started simply enough. All the usual palaver. However when the father of the bride came to make his speech it became slightly bizarre. It was odd enough for me already having sat for the duration of the meal at a table full of obscure Irish academics who had decided to swap the usual awkward small talk for a full length heated discussion on the Romans and the Visigoths.

Anyway, back to the speech. The father of the bride was a fluent Irish speaker as were all of his family. As a result he read the speech in Irish and in English. He didn’t however as you would expect read the whole thing once in Irish and once in English. Oh no. He read the first paragraph in Irish, the second in English and so on. Basically I only understood half of the speech. In summary though I could just about work out that he loved his daughter and he thought the Mexican lad was a top bloke so all’s well that ends well.

Anyway, I digress. Back to the world of TV and I last night watched a brilliant programme on the History Channel where a family living in a very old house called in experts to reveal the houses history and the history of those who lived there. It turned out that the house was built in two halves and one half dated from the tudor times and the other from medieval times. Around the time of Chaucers Canterbury Tales to be precise. Fascinating.

It certainly got me to thinking exactly who had lived in our house and what their lives had been like. Our flat is not nearly as old obviously but it dates back to 1804 which is still bloody old in my book. What’s more, some of the handiwork in the flat predates the building, with the original Georgian fireplace dating back to the 1780s. We live in an original Georgian Tenement which has 8 flats in the block. Originally the flats were homes for sea captains of a particular shipping line, the name of which has been lost in the annals of time. I would dearly like to know the history of the place and I’m seriously considering doing a bit of research. I’ll keep you posted.

On a family front, things just go from bad to worse. As I’ve already explained, I have a Grandfather in hospital. It’s quite rare for a 35 year old man such as myself to still have all four grandparents alive. In the process of typing this lengthy post I have just received a phone call from my father to say that my other Grandad collapsed last night. They are unsure yet as to the cause of his collapse but tests are ongoing. Fingers crossed it’s nothing serious.

I had a lot more to rant about but as you can imagine, it all seems a bit insignificant now.

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